Medea

Frederick Sandys submitted this Medea to the Royal Academy in 1868, and the Academy turned it down. Sandys and his friends suspected jealousy, though the sheer strangeness of the thing cannot have helped: the sorceress of Greek legend at the moment she mixes her poisons, a string of coral at her throat, mating toads in the corner, and the ship of Jason, the husband she is about to destroy, gliding away across the gold background behind her. The model was Keomi Gray, a Romani woman Sandys had met in Norwich and brought to London to sit for him. Shown a year later, in 1869, it was widely admired, and Sandys came to call it his own favourite among his paintings.